SydneyMusic.net Turns 3

And just like that, SydneyMusic.net is 3 years old.

This last year’s been a real doozy. While there’s been a continued trend of cultural rejuvenation after the devastating effects of the pandemic, you only need to look at what’s happening across the music industry to see where things are at: global economic uncertainty has led to skyrocketing costs and greater risk than ever.

And the hits keep coming: insurance costs alone have the “industry on its knees”. Festival closures were eye-watering - just look at this Reddit-sourced list. Venues in our city felt relatively stable despite some notable closures - but we still have a critical shortage of small spaces. PIAS got bought by Universal, suddenly transferring a significant chunk of the independent music ecosystem within the endlessly M&A’ing major music companies’ footprint.

We’re seeing the effects: triple j just recorded a poll with the lowest number of Australian artists ever, and Laneway put on a festival with the lowest percentage of Australian musicians in the festival’s history (and they were all done playing by 3pm). We need more discussion of why this is happening and what it means for Australian artists.

Even with the announcement of a $18.5m budget for Sound NSW funding, the mood seems grim whenever I walk into a music conference or a panel.

And yet Sydney’s music underground is exploding like never before.

The good news

Let’s talk about some good news - because there’s plenty of it.

A city that a few short years ago was famously being decried by both residents and visitors as “pretty dead, hey” has had that perception roundly turned on its head. SydneyMusic recorded 5,770 original live music events in Sydney in 2024. Almost 18% of them had an international artist. That means that according to our estimates approximately 82% of events in our guide featured entirely Australian music.

That means that if we averaged this out, on any night in Sydney across the entirety of 2024, even on Christmas Day, you could have walked out your door and seen any one of 13 performances of local music, at all levels.

As we’ve sought to document and promote the work of musicians - at all levels, in every space, in every postcode - we’ve been blown away by the ingenuity in the work, the depth of the communities that it springs from, and the thoughtful, insightful ways in which they seek to present it.

And yet, if the music industry is doing it tough, musicians are doing it way tougher.

triple j Unearthed’s excellent What’s Up In Australian Music?, a survey of 1,275 musicians published in October 2023, did an excellent job of highlighting the anxiety around the current state of the scene. Nearly half of all artists thought about bailing on the industry in the last year at the time of writing. The conversations we have across the scene tell the same story: musicians love their craft, but at what cost are they expected to stick with it? (Interestingly, 57% of SydneyMusic readers identify as musicians - but only 38% of that number derive any of their income from their craft)

So what’s going on here?

It is our firm belief that Sydney’s primary issue with live music is a demand problem, and that’s because for the vast majority of residents, live music doesn’t exist.

Take a look at these stats from currently committed live music goers:

According to data we’ve collected for the guide, over 88% of Sydney’s live music activity takes place in the Inner West or Sydney CBD. If you take out venues in the Homebush Olympic precinct, that number rises to 90%. People have less choice over where they live - it's decided by housing and rent affordability - and that makes it harder to develop a long-term investment in a local community. As a result, we are actively disenfranchising the vast majority of people in our city from our local music ecosystem by making live music harder to access.

• EXPLORE: use our interactive heatmap and see more statistics at our 2024 In Review website

We don’t see enough happening to stem this tide. There are some green shoots outside of the Inner West - Brookvale’s industrial area is overflowing with breweries, for example, some of which are making a point of hosting live music. Parramatta Lanes featured some of the most impressive, local-area uplifting local music programming we’ve ever seen from a council event. But these are really slim pickings for anyone embedded in the great expanse of Sydney’s sprawl. Most of the time, many people just forget that live music exists - or that it’s worth looking for.

We have a distinct lack of data, but it’s clear that Sydney has seen its audience for grassroots live music radically decline in the last two decades. Despite that, the punters that remain are sticking at it: 38% of respondents to SydneyMusic’s survey said they live outside of the broader Inner West and CBD. Of those, just 22% feel that there’s enough live music in their local area, but 92% say they would see more live music if there was more of it nearby.

Here’s the happy news:

• 78% of surveyed users say that they see more live music because of our gig guide

• 79.4% say they discover new music through the guide

• 78% of users read the guide at least once a week (and 33% use it multiple times per week)

• Over 20,000 unique browsers (UBs) access the website per month, and rising

• Our Instagram following has more than tripled in the last year, from 3,000 to over 10,000

And we did all of this without spending a cent on audience acquisition of any sort - pure, organic growth.

SydneyMusic at 3 (and how we can get to 4)

When we last caught up on this milestone, we were excitedly anticipating a year of focusing on this project’s operational and financial stability.

It needed to happen: at that time, SydneyMusic required about 30 hours a week to maintain - that was split between two of the project’s co-founders, just trying to keep our heads above water around our full-time day jobs. That wasn’t sustainable, and so Joe stepped away from full-time work to see if we could figure out this problem.

In the last year, thanks to the support of our community, we’ve been able to support our operations around the appointment of 4 paid gig researchers. These wonderful, passionate people spend a combined 20 hours a week combing the internet for shows, responding to your emails and generally taking care of the resource. This has made a huge difference.

Finding a sustainable pathway that won’t compromise the gig guide (as commercial consideration almost inevitably would) is time-consuming, complex and involves a lot of trial and error. We haven’t yet arrived at a position where we can say that the future of the project is assured, and we won’t be able to really rest until we get there.

SydneyMusic is worth fighting for - but we don’t have a limitless amount of energy to throw at this. Money does help: it allows us to bring in people that can help us, get access to resources that we need, and spend our time making the project better.

Meanwhile, we’re focused on getting more people out to shows by making them easier to find. Additionally, we’re doing more this year to document the scene through writing, to give it more identity and context.

We firmly believe that getting more people connected with local live music enriches our culture with expression and identity. If we increase the percentage of Sydneysiders that take an interest in live music, that’s more people that are out supporting their local music community, giving it viability and a sense of belonging.

Please, consider becoming a SydneyMusic Supporter or buying merch from our store. We need your support more than ever.

Let’s get Sydney out to some shows.